Thursday 9th June 2022

[refitman]

Morning all.

[frog222]

Morning all -This book was recommended at the LB yesterday --

In the 1980s, Kuper explains, both the Oxford tutorial system and the debating style of the Tory-dominated Oxford Union favoured charm, fluency and wit over a grasp of facts and figures. Americans attending the Oxford Union made the mistake of thinking the latter mattered, he says. “They’d say, ‘97 per cent of’ or ‘there are 420,000 who...’ If you did that at the Union, it was ‘boring’ and ‘boring’ is a core upper-class insult word…Johnson is really the epitome of this. You went down better when you do a comedic performance.”

Why does he think that was the case? “Partly because Americans in my generation thought they were still ruling the world. If you think you’re ruling the world, you’ve got to be serious because you’re playing in the big leagues. British people of my generation felt, ‘Well, we’re not really playing in the big leagues anymore. We’re just vaudeville entertainers’… I think that’s what you get when a country’s feels it’s fallen off, that it’s no longer at the top table, you become a little bit decadent... There’s a lack of seriousness… You saw that last week when Starmer was pressing [Johnson] on partygate and Johnson came up with the ‘Sir Beer Korma’ jab at Starmer’s supposed curry. You change the subject. You make a joke. You ignore the other person’s argument. That’s very much the comedic Oxford Union style.”

In Chums, Kuper also discusses another notable difference between the Oxford Etonians who’ve held power recently and those who did so in the first half of the 20th century. Almost all of the latter had experience of war. “[Harold] Macmillan said he couldn’t go back to Oxford after the war, because everyone he knew was dead.”

He believes that those men returned from war with some sense of responsibility for the other classes who fought alongside them. In Chums, he calls Johnson, Rees Mogg, Cameron et al as a “generation without tragedy”. “These were people who’d experienced nothing. They’ve experienced journalism."

Most of them became newspaper columnists initially because that was the best place for the fact-free bluster they’d perfected in tutorials and debates. “That’s what Oxford essays are. They’re newspaper columns. You don’t do all that much research and it’s a kind of quick fix [that] sounds convincing.”

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/book ... to-brexit/

This morning's policy-bribe of a new Right to Buy is typical . Even the Today Programme noted the extraordinary lack of detail !

Switched off R4 when they insisted on interviewing some GOP poli who insisted on the " God-given right to bear arms".

[AnatolyKasparov]

Good morefternoon, all.

[Willow904]

I think Johnson's going for some kind of record of how many things he can say in one sitting that makes me want to thump him. Like this little gem:

Johnson says it is wrong for the government to be spending so much money on landlords.

Like duh, why does he think the rest of us are so against selling off council houses. And no, higher wages arent the cause of energy and food price hikes, there is no "wage-price" spiral, just a price spiral and wages continuing to fall behind as they have been for the last decade.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Ok I am very much looking forward to the details on how someone on housing benefit is going to get a mortgage and be able to afford to pay it.

It's not just that you can only have £16,000 or less in capital to qualify for benefits, it's that after £6,000 the amount of benefits you receive tapers off so the more capital you have/save the less housing benefit you get. So currently that means the more you save for a deposit the less you'll be able to pay in mortgage payments. The only ways around that will be to either massively increase housing benefit, increase the capital limits significantly, or create a new savings scheme which disregards money which is being saved for a deposit.

The third option seems the most likely but how would it work? How would you prove that money is going towards a deposit and if your plans change (perhaps through no fault of your own) what happens to that cash and your benefits?

Which mortgage lenders are going to give mortgages to people who are at the mercy of a punitive benefits sytem which could cut their income at any time?

How are people already struggling enough to qualify for housing benefit supposed to save for a deposit and pay a mortgage which will most likely cost more per month than the local housing allowance*?

* (I've just done a Zoopla search for single bedroom flats in my postcode which isn't the most expensive and managed to find one single property where the housing allowance would cover the estimated mortgage and it's a tiny basement flat in an area I'd avoid in daylight never mind at night).

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Like duh, why does he think the rest of us are so against selling off council houses.

The thing is, practically every Tory I've ever spoken to about this thinks right to buy was/is a disaster. Even my Thatcher worshipping landlord admits it was a huge mistake. I mean take a look at this in The Express of all papers...

Right to Buy scheme revival slammed as ‘crazy idea’ by readers.

https://www.express.co.uk/finance/perso ... ohnson-spt

It's only deluded Tory ideologues who still cling to the idea that right to buy was a popular success, out in the real world it's seen as quite the opposite, even amongst their own voters. You'd think the Conservatives own polling would tell them this but it goes against Thatcherite orthodoxy so once again we end up with a terrible policy which will make things worse based on nothing more than ideological fantasy.

On the plus side, if Johnson thinks this will help him regain his popularity, especially in 'red wall' seats, he's out of his mind.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

The third option seems the most likely but how would it work? How would you prove that money is going towards a deposit and if your plans change (perhaps through no fault of your own) what happens to that cash and your benefits?

To answer my own question they're using this...

https://www.gov.uk/lifetime-isa

Lifetime ISAs are going to be disregarded which means that effectively anyone under 40 has just had their capital limits for claiming benefits hugely increased while the rest of us can get stuffed (unless you already have one).

[gilsey]

The success of right to buy, so far as it went, was one-off, unrepeatable, like any other privatisation.

If it goes ahead for HAs, that will also be a one-off, because there's no way to make it work financially as an ongoing policy. So it will more or less destroy what remains of our social rented sector and the private sector leeches will be all that's left.

[gilsey]

[AnatolyKasparov]

Peston does understand economics (if not so much politics) reasonably well, so there is a good chance he is right here.

[Willow904]

Peston does understand economics (if not so much politics) reasonably well, so there is a good chance he is right here.

I'm not so sure. Boris doesn't seem at all concerned about his economic legacy, he seems quite happy to ramp up the deficit and the debt as long as the proceeds end up in the pockets of his wealthy donors and mates. Having said that, he does have a track record of achieving next to nothing of note in office (did anything happen when he was London Mayor that hadn't been started by the previous administration?) and even Brexit was mostly May so yeah, I don't think it will happen for those reasons but I can't see worries about fiscal responsibility, or even legality, holding him back from trying. If such policies win him the support to carry on. Most Tory voters would see things like right to buy discounts and using housing benefits for mortgages as giving their tax paying money away to the "undeserving" poor, surely? How does this actually work for him with voters rather than just the fat cats that bankroll him who always have ways to benefit from such schemes?

[refitman]

[RogerOThornhill]

Good evening.

Someone decided to go and listen to the Birbalsingh woman talk about social mobility...not sure he was that impressed going by this...

[Sky'sGoneOut]

I've never witnessed Tom Harwood in action before. Dear oh dear.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

QT tonight was in Dorking. A very reserved, conservative audience in Surrey? Well I never.

For GB News we had Tom Harwood. As mentioned above I'd never seen Tom in action before and he appears to be attempting to become a British 'reduced to clear' version of Tucker Carlson. He spouts simplistic populism padded out with incontinent verbal diarrhea while perpetually looking quizzically confused like a dog trying to understand quadratic equations. He also appears to be economically illiterate. On the one hand he barks out that tax is bad like a good Tory puppy while on the other he was advocating massive government spending on building new housing because poor Tom apparently can't afford a house of his own. People highlight stupid shit he's said on Twitter for a laugh and you think, 'Well maybe he's just doing it for the attention', but no, tonight's performance demonstrated he really is spectacularly dim. Which tells you something about the Dorking audience because they applauded him at one point.

For the Tories we had Chris Philp. Chris looks like a kind of sub-lieutenant to a Bond villian, he's lean and hatchet-faced enough to appear dangerous but lacks the personality or presence to be considered a lead baddie. Which curiously mirrors his position in the Conservative party. Besides embarrassing himself defending Johnson, tonight Chris was magicking new social housing out of thin air while telling us rail strikes were taking us back to the Seventies. If only. When I was a kid growing up on a council estate in the Seventies we were poor but nobody had to rely on charity from food banks or have footballers pressure the government to provide school meals. The worst we had was Thatcher snatching our milk.

For Labour we had Wes Streeting. Wes was his usual combative self which works until it doesn't. There appears to be no medium 'chilled out' setting with Wes. You flick the switch and he goes instantly to pissed off and argumentative until you turn him off. You get the feeling you could take Wes to the top of a mountain to appreciate the wonderful vista and enjoy a beautiful sunset and he'd still have his teeth clenched spitting forth fury at the fucking injustices of the world. Admirable in its own way but after a while it gets a bit too intense and you slink away for a bit of relief.

For the Lib Dems we had Layla Moran. I've never made it a secret here that I appreciate Layla's many charms, so I don't claim to be an impartial observer but once again she was great. From laying into Johnson with genuine disgust to pointing out the treasury is raking it in because of inflation so VAT cuts for all she once again showed why she should be leading the Lib Dems instead of that piece of sentient wet lettuce they elected.

For the 'decent' Tories we had Rory Stewart. I like Rory despite him writing a book about the borders after living there for about 5 minutes that was full of absolute bollocks. He's hard not to like because of his obvious enthusiasm, decency and naivety. He's one of those people you might disagree with but love anyway. He should never have become a politician, especially a Tory one. What was he thinking?

[Sky'sGoneOut]